Everyone knows what noise is. But did you know it is actually a technical term in marketing communications?

NOISE is any communication received by someone in addition to a marketing message.

That’s pretty broad. If the baby cries while you’re handling email, that’s noise. So it doesn’t necessarily have a derogatory connotation.

It’s just something competing for your target’s attention.

As covered in an earlier article, the very FIRST thing you have to do is get someone’s attention.

Consider the marketing scene in the American west around 1850.

There was no radio, no TV, no billboards, no Internet. A housewife might get a magazine or a catalog in the mail. When she went into a shop, the proprietor might tell her about some new item he just got in from San Francisco. There might be a weekly newspaper on sale.

Peaceful, right?

Today, the average person is exposed to some 3000 advertising messages a day. Spam email, texts and phone calls, pop-ups on your bank’s website. It’s enough to drive someone nuts.

But the main point is, this is the situation into which you are trying to get your message across.

It’s a constantly escalating war to be heard.

Many marketers with money to spend, respond by getting even louder. Channels that used to send emails weekly now often send them daily. Another response is to invent a new channel which is not yet cluttered. I noted some years ago that advertisements started appearing on the floor of grocery stores. I haven’t seen the numbers but I bet it was effective. A lot of people go through life looking downward.

The response of the consumer is frequently to act to limit the amount of advertising messages they get or pay attention to. At the extreme, some people just stop using the Internet broadly. Others, and this is a large number of people, just don’t look at any ad. The advertiser doesn’t even get a chance to get a message across. The consumer has tuned out.

No surprise, response rates in many forms of advertising have seen a steady decline.

But guess what. People are still buying. They are still finding out about new products and services.

If your company wants more response to expand your business or even to stay afloat, the first step, if you’re facing declining response, is to understand what you are dealing with. Increased noise isn’t the only potential factor. Changing consumer attitudes and increased competition are two other common factors. It isn’t hard to pin it down.

Its not new news to say that the first step in solving a problem is to understand what the problem actually is.

Then you can deal with it. If its noise, keep exploring channels until you find something that works.

Someone is getting that business.